Pass it to Maradona! It was an incredibly successful football strategy in the 1980s. Sometimes, even the God apparently lent a hand to the strategy’s success!

Similarly, ‘pass it to the machine’ must be an equally fruitful marketing strategy of our times. It basically means to automate the whole customer relationship management (CRM) process.

But how do you actually pass it to the machine?

Well, here is how it works. If you are not quite well-versed with the CRM and marketing activities, first let us quickly have a run down on how the marketing process works in a betting company’s CRM division. Then we will see how it is automated with Smartico’s platform.

A word about the platform before we begin. It has three major parts:

1. Real time marketing application
2. Gamification tool
3. Real time business intelligence (BI) module

Sportsbook Operator’s Conventional Promotional Method

The CRM division of every major Sportsbook works super efficiently to attract maximum players to punt on the games that they promote.

Let’s take a look at how the CRM division works before a major game of European football.  The CRM division sends all sorts of promotions and intimations to players in their databases.

Promotions can be in the form of any format, mainly the following:

• Emails
• SMS on their phones
• Messages on their social media feeds like Facebook or Twitter timeline
• Push notifications to the app users
• Pop-ups on the website

The operators have to get the text needed for emails and message notifications, videos and graphics for social media promotion for each game separately and schedule their sending on appropriate timings on CRM software.

Then there are the categories of players, or buckets as they are sometimes called. For example,

• one bucket of regular, loyal customers,
• another comprising occasional customers,
• yet another having only newly joined customers,
• another bucket comprising dormant customers and so on.

For each bucket, the promotional feature has to be customized. That is, different versions of emails, social media graphics and messages are ideally required for each category of players. Some clusters of customers will also need some kind of bonuses or offers to spur them into punt for this game. So the CRM operators have to add information about such bonuses manually too.

As you can see, it involves cumbersome manual work and there is a good chance that the intended message still may not reach the right player.

Automation can make the process easy and ensure that each player receives exactly the right kind of messages and intimations.

Inside the Automation Process with Smartico

Smartico’s three-pronged software application makes life easy for CRM operators.

The operators need to get the various kinds of creatives done as previously – text, graphics, video and all that. They have to create at least one template for each mode of communication too: for email, SMS push notification, social media posts and so on.

That’s all. The software will take care of the rest.

It uses special dynamic tags to deliver the right kind of content about the right match to the right players through the right channel by leveraging the real time BI module that churns live player data.

The CRM operators can select the games from a list of upcoming games across leagues that they want to promote. The software will initiate an automated marketing campaign at a scheduled time before each match.

One of the software’s most useful features is the Campaign flow builder, which allows the operators to create the flow and order of sending various modes of communication. For example, first send emails, then push notifications or SMS, then social media promotions and and finally show a popup when the player logs in to the website or app of the sportsbook.

Each of the communication will contain two kinds of creatives:

1. Fixed
2. Dynamic

Fixed communication will be the text, graphics and video that are intended to persuade the players to sign in and place bets.

Dynamic communication refers to the text and graphics that provide the information that keeps on changing from match to match: such as the names of the competing teams, the league, stadium, date and time of the match and such like. If the communication offers bonuses or special offers, the text and graphics depicting the bonus or offer are also will be part of the dynamic communication.

The software will automatically populate the dynamic elements in each communication based on the real time data of player behavior data and preferences.  For this the software makes use of something called dynamic tags.

To sum up, the work flow of the operator changes as follows:

• Create the templates of email, messages, graphics and videos
• Choose the matches that need to be promoted
• Select with the targeted population of customers (That is, the operator can opt for promoting Bundesliga matches just to the players who routinely bet on Bundesliga matches only)
• Set the starting time for the campaign – how many day, weeks or even months before the match (even if matches are postponed or get cancelled for some reason, the software will alter the communication schedule accordingly)
• Insert bonus offers, wherever needed.
• Pick the order of communication modes through Campaign flow builder
• Sit back and watch the results

This way, the operators can think about improving the overall quality of the marketing campaigns and look for innovations, rather than running hurriedly to tick each boxes of the communication mix.

The software saves time, delivers better results and better streamlines the operations.

So, pass it to the machine!